


three hundred sixty four

by Phosphorite



Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-12
Updated: 2014-05-12
Packaged: 2018-01-24 12:52:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1605854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phosphorite/pseuds/Phosphorite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[30:00]</p><p>Thirty minutes, in Transit.</p><p>That's how long they've got to remember everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	three hundred sixty four

**Author's Note:**

> This is something I literally wrote for myself as an exercise in therapeutic writing.
> 
> It might not offer much to most people (especially if you haven't read _Waiting for Godot_ ), but I promise I'll get back to writing more easily accessible things soon. I guess I just wanted to get this out of my brain, one way or another.
> 
> Thank you for your time.
> 
> EDIT on may 14th: added a link to the bottom of the post explaining about this story a little!

 

 

There's a rustle of dry wind, and a split second silence where the world stands still.

He holds his breath, and waits for the wave of energy to hit. In a single heartbeat, there's a sound in his ears like a faulty record grinding to a halt; then a sudden explosion of cacophony, as fragments of life burst out of a sudden vacuum.

Somewhere down below the world resumes light and sound. When he opens his eyes, the wavering air is a pulse he can feel resonating all the way in his heart.

It is a presence he could tell apart from each and every constellation in the sky.

"I'm glad to see you back."

A loud clatter disrupts the harmony atop the tower, and a flurry of swear words soon follows. A tiny smile nestles itself on the corner of his mouth; the first couple of minutes of Transit, trying to adjust to gravity in a temporary body, are always the worst.

"Hey, what do you think this is, a shitty rendition of _Waiting for Godot_?"

There's a sudden weight of the air that condenses around him; a light trickle of wind brushes past where he normally would feel an arm around his own, and it feels like a static feed that conducts right into his bones.

The platform beneath their feet trembles, as though right on cue.

[30:00]

_Thirty minutes._

That's how long they've got, to remember everything.

When Haruka breathes in, he can almost trace the memory of Rin's scent.

 

 

 

[29:54]

Turning his head, he finds Rin leaning against the rail.

A playfulness tugs on Rin's mouth as the evening wind keeps tugging at his hair, and for a passing moment Haruka loves and hates everything about this world with every fiber of his being.

He resists the urge to stare.

"I didn't know you'd taken up reading," he says, instead.

Rin lets out a snort, the traces of his laughter dancing in the evening wind.

"Well, I had to use the extra years you left me with for something."

His voice is airy, but a jolt of something unpleasant clutches Haruka by the chest; his eyes barely widen, but it only takes Rin half a second to notice, and another one to frown.

"Don't–– hey, Haru, don't start with any of that. You know what we agreed on."

Haruka doesn't nod, nor does he avert his gaze.

"Besides," Rin goes on, and his voice makes Haruka's gaze lift at the sudden softness, "It's... Look, it's fine. It wasn't your fault this time. I'm––"

Rin comes to a pause, breathes out, shakes his head. A trail of glimmering dust radiates off him where the temporary body fails to conceal his true emotion, but Haruka knows better than to pry.

He knows what Rin would say, and they don't have time for this right now.

_What's done is done; what's said is said._

_You don't look back, and you don't regret._

_No matter what happens, never regret._

He wasn't expecting any less.

 

 

 

[25:43]

"So, what's up next?" Rin asks, and Haruka wishes he could buy into the carefree demeanor as much as Rin wants him to believe in it.

He takes a step back, lifts up a hand, and a stream of light blue seeps out of Haruka's fingertips until it forms a sphere.

He frowns.

"... It's still charging."

Rin stretches out his arms behind his head, ignoring the way his back pushes against the metal rail separating them from a plummeting fall.

"I'm hoping for something fun this time. Like. I dunno. Aliens. Or dinosaurs. Or zombies. Zombie dinosaurs!"

"It doesn't work like that," Haruka mutters under his breath.

Rin shrugs again. "One of these days it might," he says, and the laughter that follows those words is self-ironic in a way that sounds like an inside joke; when Haruka's hand tightens into a fist, the sphere vanishes.

"Don't tell me you haven't thought about it," Rin goes on, and with an agile leap, seats himself atop the rail. "Let's see... What have we had, so far?"

Each word is accentuated by a count of his fingers, and Rin goes on reciting the line like he has done a hundred times before. "Mythical creatures, historical periods, mecha pilots... Haah, remember the coffee shop? Or was it a bakery? They're not the same thing, are they?"

It's another joke, and as stale as the one before. Rin doesn't need to remember, because each life remains within his consciousness, as crisp as the day he was born ( _three hundred and sixty four times over_ ); even if it's only for now, even if the memory exists no longer than for the next––

[21:15]

––minutes.

Haruka breathes in deeply, resisting the urge to scream.

The sound wouldn't come out, anyway.

 

 

 

[20:48]

"You think I just jinxed it, hoping for dinosaurs? Because I don't really want to deal with dinosaurs."

The sky bleeds in the same shade as Rin's hair.

 

 

 

[20:32]

"It doesn't work like that," Haruka repeats, and for a moment he feels like there's something he forgot after all.

 

 

 

[19:50]

 _There_.

He remembers it a split second too late – that what these temporary bodies lack in some senses, they make up for in others; remembers that Rin can still read each tentative shift of his shoulders, the weariness that holds him down like a foreign word on the tip of his tongue.

"Hey, what's with you tonight? You're even... moodier than usual."

In a single step Rin's by Haruka's side, leaning over; the art of tilting up Haruka's chin still comes to him like an old habit, even when his fingers brush right through Haruka's skin.

What he is able to catch, though, is Haruka's unguarded gaze.

"...If this is about what happened, I told you, it's fine. It's not as if it's the first time you've died before me, you know."

Haruka blinks, but doesn't pull away.

The crimson dust radiating off Rin's skin intensifies, as though he's not trying to hold it in anymore; it dispels the hesitance that has been seizing Haruka's heart.

"...I had to wait for a long time," is what he finally says.

(The rest of his words go unspoken, but from the shadow that clouds over Rin's expression, they still linger in the air;

_for forty-three years, I waited for you here_

_and in eighteen minutes, you'll be lost to me again_ )

Rin's not smiling anymore.

 

 

 

[17:07]

"What was she like?"

It's not suspicion, it's not doubt. Haruka knows, because Rin doesn't return any; he only lets a lone sigh filter through his teeth, mixing with the echo of the world soaring somewhere below.

He sounds old, he sounds resigned.

Haruka feels cold, and confined.

"...She was very patient," Rin eventually says, and Haruka nods.

Rin doesn't ask him how he knows, and Haruka doesn't tell him how much it hurts.

(He understands, but it still hurts.)

Instead, Haruka turns around and stares into the horizon, the sky now diluted like a watercolour swatch; Rin remains silent, as though sensing that it's all Haruka wants to hear.

Forty-three years is a long time,

( _a long time to live without the one you love_ )

Neither one of them needs to say this aloud.

 

 

 

[14:53]

"...It finally finished charging."

The wind picks up around them as a soft blue glow lights up Haruka's face.

Rin instinctively reaches out for the sphere, but it swerves past his grip. "H, hurry up," he breathes out, hiding any trace of bewilderment in the urgency of his tone, "...I want to know where we're going next."

Haruka shoots him a defensive glare, but focuses long enough for the image to flash in his mind's eye; once he's done, a light frown adorns his brow.

"...Water," he says.

Rin stares back at him. "Water?"

"I can't–– I couldn't say for sure what it means," Haruka hesitates, feeling oddly excited in an abrupt wave of emotion that he cannot quite place, "But I definitely saw water."

Rin seems pensive. "But we've already done water."

Haruka shrugs. "...We've done a lot of things."

"Yeah, but––"

"Twelve years."

Rin looks up. "Huh?"

Haruka's still staring at the sphere, lost in thought. "You'll have to wait twelve years," he repeats, "...One year here. Eleven once you're born. That's–– that's when we'll meet again."

"...You're going to be _older_ than me?"

"... _That's_ what you're concerned about?"

"No, but I––"

Rin bites his lip, shakes his head, takes a deep breath. "Fine, okay, anything else I should know?"

"At an early age, you might want to invest in an orthodontist."

" _Haru_ ––" Rin chokes out trying to swallow down sudden laughter, and the sound of his name on Rin's tongue leaves Haruka burning all the way down to his spine.

 

 

[12:18]

No, this is not a shitty rendition of _Waiting for Godot_.

If it were, he would say,

_Well, shall we go?_

and Rin would say,

_Yes, let's go._

And neither one of them would go.

 

 

 

[12:03]

(At the end of the day, someone's always got to go.)

 

 

 

[11:59]

"––This time, I won't let you go."

Haruka can tell by the look in Rin's eyes that the words catch him by surprise.

A familiar heat trickles up Rin's neck, even after all these years, worlds, lives, and for a moment Haruka would give up each and every one just for a chance to touch his face.

"...It doesn't work like that," it's Rin's turn to say, but his voice comes out low, almost as though a hesitant, hopeful dare.

Haruka nods.

For three hundred and sixty four lives he has thought the same.

"Nothing is certain," he says, though;

(that's why he'll make it work like that.)

 

 

 

[11:11]

He makes a wish.

 

 

 

[10:41]

"Haru," Rin repeats his name, and for some reason Haruka finds it hard to hold his gaze.

The metal beneath his feet trembles with more vigor as the last ten minutes begin to tick away.

 

 

 

[10:19]

The sky is a pixelated canvas of wine.

"I don't want to have to forget you anymore, Rin."

 

 

 

[09:36]

 

 

 

[09:20]

 

 

 

[08:54]

The air stands still until Rin looks right at him again.

"Alright."

(Thirty minutes in Transit is all they've ever had, but Rin says, _alright_.)

 

 

[07:54]

He has always known one of these times it might be _the last time_.

This is not what he fears.

(What he fears is one day growing used to saying goodbye.)

 

 

 

[07:21]

"You're... really going to do this, aren't you?"

Rin leans his arms against the rail; the metal begins to chip away under his touch, dissolving particle by particle, but he doesn't even seem to notice.

Haruka nods. He knows what Rin is thinking of –can feel the weight of hundreds of repeated mistakes haunting his mind as much as they haunt Haruka's– but Rin forces on a carefree smile.

Rin lets out a long, drawled sound and arches his spine. "I wonder what we're going to do," he muses aloud. "If we really did break the cycle. I wonder what happens then."

He steals a glance at Haruka, who averts his eyes. A light blue stream has already started seeping out of his skin, deteriorating his temporary body by the minute; it won't be long now, before the shift, but Haruka feels strangely calm.

"It's worth finding out," he eventually responds.

The smile on Rin's face grows deeper with something private that elevates Haruka's heart.

Rin knows, too.

 _It's worth it,_ his smile says, _trying to be happy._

 

 

 

[04:56]

"Twelve years, huh," Rin says.

Haruka nods again.

Rin stretches out his arms, attempting to come across as aloof.

"It's not so long, when you think about it," he says.

"It's not," Haruka agrees.

 

 

 

[03:43]

"Rin, it's... almost time."

"For you, maybe. I'm stuck here for another year."

"...Maybe you can read another play while waiting. Maybe not one about the depths of existentialism."

Rin may not be able to hit him, but Haruka could swear the soda can that travels through his head still stings a little.

"You know," Rin scrunches up his nose in thought, and cocks back his head, "If we never come back to Transit again, then doesn't it technically mean that from the next three minutes onward, only what we do here on out will count?"

Haruka frowns. "...What do you mean?"

Rin gestures with his hand, beckoning at the rail and the fall that lies beneath. "It doesn't matter if we learn nothing valuable. It doesn't matter if we do nothing meaningful. It doesn't matter if we messed up three hundred and sixty four times in the past."

He turns to Haruka. "'Cause you're gonna dive right in, and I'm gonna dive right in, and it's gonna be–– just you. And me. The only future we'll have left is the one we choose for our own."

The smile on his face is strangely... shy. "Isn't that kind of rom–– exciting, in a way?"

That smile is strangely contagious, too.

"Who knows," Haruka says, and hides his own.

"Well, assuming you won't fail, anyway," Rin hastily adds with a boisterous grin, to cover up for his embarrassment, "Shit, for all I know, in seventy years of time I'm just gonna find myself here again, with you making fun of my taste in literature."

"I won't," Haruka says.

He stares at the ground below, growing dimmer by the moment.

"Because I'm not doing this alone."

 

 

 

[01:26]

Three hundred sixty five lives.

To say Haruka is used to the way it feels to shift through Transit into Motion would be an understatement; still, as the warmth that grips his bones, it feels a lot like saying goodbye to an old friend.

Maybe Rin is right. Maybe he won't break the cycle. Maybe all that happens (in this world of water, world of _twelve years is not such a long time when you think about it_ ) is no different than the hundreds of worlds before.

Maybe a story only ever has a happy ending depending on where it draws to a close.

 

 

 

[01:02]

Maybe it's time they nonetheless chose that for themselves.

 

 

 

[00:49]

The air around Haruka feels light, like a softness that wraps around his body.

It takes one leap to enter Motion; only a single hand grasped around the rail holds him from being tugged along with the wind.

Rin opens his mouth to say something, but Haruka gets there first.

He knows when he pulls up to Rin, only the dust particles of his dissolving soul reach out to touch Rin's lips.

He swears, swears he can feel it anyway.

 

 

 

[00:14]

"Come find me," Haruka breathes out.

His voice breaks into the wind; it catches Rin long enough for his face to light up, and the last thing Haruka remembers is the radiance of Rin's smile blending into every colour of the sky.

 

 

 

[00:03]

(He will not forget.)

 

 

\- **end**

* * *

**ESTRAGON:**

Wait! ( _He moves away from Vladimir._ ) I sometimes wonder if we wouldn't have been better off alone, each one for himself. ( _He crosses the stage and sits down on the mound._ ) We weren't made for the same road.

**VLADIMIR:**

( _Without anger_ ) It is not certain.

**ESTRAGON:**

No, nothing is certain.

_Vladimir slowly crosses the stage and sits beside Estragon._

 

_Waiting For Godot_

by Samuel Beckett

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This story came about from two primary things: a play on Alternate Universes (where each AU people have ever written represent a different life; two stories that I had on my mind prior to this in particular were Bent and Penny's, the latter which inspired a good chunk of the direction of the plot), and Rin's first line in the story, which made me re-read _Waiting for Godot_ , only to realize how well it fit the theme of being in transit, never really getting anywhere (unless you make a conscious change, which the characters in the play never really do). Spot the flying references throughout the story.
> 
> I like to think that as many times as these kids mess up, they'll always find their way back to one another - through hard work, determination, and the simple desire to just be together.
> 
> Thank you for reading.
> 
> EDIT: I got asked about the system behind this universe, and I figured I'd link a brief explanation [here](http://icecreambat.tumblr.com/post/85694457936/amusingmurff-replied-to-your-post-title-three) in case anyone's interested!


End file.
